What is the hunt? Raven started this game in which they hide clues across the interwebs. The clues are on their site and other Search Marketing blogs. They did one hunt last month (I was lame and didn’t participate that time), and the newest one just started yesterday.

The Second Clue is being released today at 1pm CDT.

Don’t think you can’t participate because you’re a day or two behind though. The other clues are still out there for you to find. And it ain’t over until the Raven is Found! This contest is open to everyone, not just search marketers, and you can join in any day. Oh, wanna know what you can win?An Apple iPad.

RavenHunt Quick Facts:

• RavenHunt is free for anyone and you can start playing at any time
• There are two RavenHunt clues released each day (Be Sure to Get Both!!)
• The object of RavenHunt is to collect the secret letters you find when you solve riddles
• On Friday, the second RavenHunt clue will include a form for you to input the unscrambled secret word
• You need to follow Raven’s Facebook and Twitter accounts to be updated on when clues are released

RavenHunt Prizes

First Place:

• Apple iPad
• 1 year Pro subscription to Raven
• Premium Membership to Search Engine Land
• Copy of The New Community Rules by Tamar Weinberg
• Copy of Web Analytics 2.0 by Avinash Kaushik
• Official RavenHunt t-shirt

Second Place:

• 6 month Pro subscription to Raven
• Official RavenHunt t-shirt

3rd-10th Places:

• Official RavenHunt t-shirt

Join The RavenHunt is a post from: Kate Morris

Background

I am not a tools type of search engine marketer. Well, in terms of PPC bid management tools. I love Raven Tools and SEOmoz and some of the newer PPC tools like WordStream. (Yes, some of those are affiliate links)

There are some tools developers in the PPC space that I keep hearing about but have never seen. For the most part I don’t have the clients that are large enough for them. But seeing as there are some new awesome tools, I’ve been more open to requests from tool developers in the PPC space.

The LiveBall Approach

I got an email from Kristina Allen at Ion Interactive on February 15th asking me to review a press release about their most recent developments. Normally these requests are dry when coming from PR people, but Kristina got it right. The title of the email was Leprechauns, Lattes and LiveBall. She got immediate bonus points for originality and attention grabbing.

Her email not only got my attention, but Kristina, whom I had never met, had taken the time to read my site and understand me. She talked about my SEM Cereals post and asked nicely if I’d look at the release. She kept things light and informal.

Girl should get a raise just for that.

LiveBall

I had heard of Ion Interactive, but had no idea what they did. I wanted to help, but I can’t talk about something I know nothing about. Within 24 hours they had a demo setup and were sending me everything I needed to review their tool. The CEO was even present for the demo to answer my questions. So thanks to Justin Talerico and Megan Leap for answering all of my questions.

And just to make it clear, they are not paying me to write a good review. I am highly critical of unnecessary tools and will tell you the way it is. But I do need to tell my readers that they did send me a copy of their book, Honest Seduction. (Warning: affiliate link) I haven’t read it yet, but it’s on my list now.

LiveBall Review

LiveBall is a landing page optimization tool that is hosted on the Ion servers. Basically they setup an environment on their servers in which marketing people can create landing pages to test in an easy interface. LiveBall is hosting on a dedicated IP address for each customer. The pages created by their system are cross browser friendly (I asked) and while are hosted on their domain, they are pointed at a subdomain on your root domain.

The team there aids in building themes based around your current site layout. So they start the account for you by coding everything to look like your site. Testing these pages allows you to keep the same look and feel as the rest of your site. Your marketing managers can add and subtract elements to test through their easy WYSIWYG editor.

One feature I loved is that the LiveBall system gives you image galleries to choose stock images to test. Right now they are organized into six categories including Active Life, Business People, Healthcare, Higher Education, Leisure People, and Meanings. I’ve done testing, and it can get expensive to buy all the images you need for pages that you might not even keep!

The greatest thing? All of the pages created are SEO compliant. (That’s what their release was about) You can use the canonical tag to point the search engines at the “real” version, or add a “noindex” if you don’t want these pages in the index. You can add in your own tracking code, but they have built in tracking as well to help aide in decision making about the best landing page possible. And the system passes query strings so that you can track what you need to for your system as well as collecting important keyword information.

Overall Thoughts

This is something I would recommend to a company that has a marketing department and needs a way to test landing pages on the fly without interrupting the IT and web development side. Ion makes it clear that this system is built with marketers in mind, not necessarily code-minded people. It’s simple and easy to use, but also builds nice code on the back end.

What a company can learn in this system can be pushed to web development once conclusions are drawn. LiveBall and Ion have no issue with their clients taking the information and code developed in the system and putting into use on the whole site, I made sure to ask. Most companies will want to take what is learned and use it on the whole site back on the home server.

In talking with their team they understand that landing page optimization is not just for PPC. That is why they released the SEO compliant features. They know that testing is not a one time thing, and over time even the best campaigns can use some optimization. You never know when one change to a page can result in a 10% increase in conversion rates.

LiveBall Review is a post from: Kate Morris

Kristy Bolsinger

Congratulations! Check out her post and all the other comments reviewing the best things about Raven Tools. You all did great, thanks so much for entering. Keep up with Raven and you might just hear about the next shirt they do. No doubt it’ll be great!

Raven Tools PubCon T-Shirt Winner is a post from: Kate Morris

Raven Team

A few weeks before PubCon, Jon Henshaw sent me the coolest shirt ever. I had the honor of getting a limited edition PubCon shirt before everyone else. I was stoked. Raven shirts are awesome. This one was much more so. They are always really comfortable and well designed.

Raven PubCon Design

Note the name of the designer. None other than Jon’s wife, Kathryn (awesome name spelling btw).

The issue with these shirts is that Raven didn’t make many. They ran out fast once they started giving them away, but I have a surprise. I have an extra one.

How to Win a Limited Edition Raven Tools PubCon Shirt

So it’s the guys shirt (read: Green) in XL. Sorry you don’t get to choose the size. This was a bonus shirt that was magically left over.

So to win the shirt, you need to comment on this post or write a blog post about what about Raven Tools is your favorite. Anything. My favorite comment or blog post will win. Don’t have a favorite because you aren’t using Raven? Umm, free 30 day trial much?

I’ll mail you the shirt and if you send me a pic, I’ll post it here. You have until Thanksgiving, November 26, 2009.

Raven PubCon Shirt Giveaway is a post from: Kate Morris

Jeremy Bencken and I met up at Starbucks and he told me the story of this new idea he was exploring, and I was floored. It was an idea that no one had come up with yet, but it was so important to the search marketing world. I was asked to keep it on the down low and did for a number of months. But since BuzzStream was named and sent to Beta, I have been the biggest fan girl.

So what is BuzzStream?

In one sentence: BuzzStream is a CRM for Linkbuilding.

What I get a lot is, “Well then why not use Salesforce for linkbuilding?” Basically? Salesforce is meant for sales, BuzzStream is for linkbuilding.

BuzzStream automatically grabs the info that a linkbuilder would need to classify the site for starters. It’s not just for tracking emails, contacts, and taking notes (but it does all of that). It’s more than that. Just a few of the items they pull for you are:

• Contact information (from any page on the site, email addresses, forms, phone numbers)
• Page Rank
• Number of Backlinks
• Site Age

The link building data they pull is only part of the system. BuzzStream has places to put the information you will need to reference later. It also automatically checks the sites to ensure the link you worked so hard on still exists. It checks that the link is there as well as making sure that it’s followed and the page doesn’t all of a sudden have poor onpage elements like Viagra ads.

Make Link Building Easy and Effective

We all hate link building. It is harder than ever to locate and create relationships with other sites. Buzzstream is there to help us track what we have done and the relationships we are building. The key is the relationship-building, but building relationships takes a lot of time.  You have to contact a lot of people, you have to try different channels, you have to remember what you did 2 months ago and follow up.   BuzzStream is the first tool that enables you to do all of this in a way that’s actually time-efficient.

Sales has metrics, Marketing has metrics, SEO and PPC do too … now Link Builders can have metrics. Pull reports for executives or clients, it’s all there at your fingertips. BuzzStream is adding features at every turn, so sign up now for access to the best link building tool. For example, one of the new items is that they are the first Social CRM – meaning they will import your tweets to identify contacts to build links with. Your boss and/or clients will thank you!

BuzzStream Review is a post from: Kate Morris

RavenTools is a smattering of just about every SEO tool you might want. Just to name some of my favorite features:

• Social Media Mentions tracking (think Trackur)
• Design Analyzer
• Keyword Analyzer
• Knowem
• Analytics
• Link Manager
• Social Media Profiles Manager
• SERP Tracker
• Firefox Toolbar to control it all

Please note these are just a few features, there are tons more. The one I was the most impressed with and use everyday is the Social Media Mentions. It sends you an email every morning say how many mentions were found, linking you to the list. You can then rate or delete the mention to get a score of how happy the interwebz are with your brand.

They are adding new features everyday, things like KnowEm and SEMRush (for organic) that you might use/pay for seperately, but are included with your subscription! They take all the tools you use in different places and bring it into one with some awesome bonus features.

Check it out … there is a 30-day free trial. And if you catch the team at an event sometime, grab a shirt. Trust me, the most comfortable shirts ever! And the team is awesome as well, great people to know!

Review of RavenTools is a post from: Kate Morris